Scottie Pippen: Fans need to stop criticizing Derrick Rose

Former Chicago Bulls star Scottie Pippen thinks that some fans have been too hard on point guard Derrick Rose.

Rose sustained a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee last May and missed the entire NBA season while rehabilitating the injury despite being medically cleared to practice in five-on-five situations in mid-February.

He received a lot of criticism for not returning after his doctor gave him the go-ahead.

"I was kind of surprised people turned on him knowing the difficulty of Derrick's injury," Pippen told reporters at Nike's pro-am basketball league at Whitney Young High School in Chicago on Saturday. "No one can justify what he's going through. No one can make his decision as to when to get back on the basketball court. I thought he took a little bit of a hit for it.

"As a player that has played this game, I know at the end of the day I've had numerous amount of surgeries, and the doctors released me at numerous amount of times to go and play. But a lot of those times didn't mean go and play against the best in the world right now, but to get yourself ready to compete again. Sometimes as a player, you're not there yet. The doctor can tell you the headache is gone, but he don't totally know that it is gone unless he can get in your head."

Playing without Rose, the Bulls were eliminated from the playoffs this season in the second round by the Miami Heat.

"Fans are demanding," Pippen said. "They want to win. They want it now. If you have an injury, they want you back the next day. It was a process.

"We were all hoping that things would have worked out, but it didn't work out that way. But there's no reason to start to doubt or have any negative activity about Derrick because he was not able to come back this season. I think you just have to look ahead and believe that it was the right decision as a whole, for him, for the organization and we have to move on."